First we were introduced to some of the tools and how to interact with the Debian BTS. Then we looked at the list of Release Critical bugs currently affecting Debian. At the time, there was more than 1000 bugs which would prevent a new release. Since this is too many (Debian require the number to drop to zero before making a release) we took a look at some of them.

First we looked at a bug report about a program crashing at startup, while getting to know our way around the BTS. We all tested to see if we could reproduce the issue in various environments. I was the only one who got the crash in my virtual machin running Sid (yay!). However, the exact same version of the package would not crash on Ubuntu Saucy, so the underlying issue was assumed to reside in one of the dependencies. We gathered a list of which versions/environments we had tested along with the results and a diff of the changes in dependencies from a working version to the crashing one. We submitted this as a comment to the bug report.

Next up, we looked at various bugs which had been filed as a result of failing rebuilds. A lot of them had a common cause, compilers have become stricter about imports, so some programs need to explicitly import libraries the compiler would add automatically in the past. One bug was picked as an example, and we all looked into it in parallel, attempting to patch it and get it to build. Related to this, we went through the process of installing dependencies, building the package, generating a diff and adding it as a proper patch.

After getting acquainted with the various tools and parts, we were let loose, all tasked with finding a similar bug and hopefully fix it by the end of the day. After some back-and-forth, I got a working patch for one of the bugs and submitted it. (Looks like another patch was used instead, but it also looks better than mine. Anyways, the important thing is that the package is now working again.) For a total list of all the bugs we looked at, see here.

All in all, it was a fun and nice experience. I had looked at most of the tools previously, but it was nice to have someone who were more familiar with them and would answer questions when someone ran into issues. I was also pleasantly surprised how easy (relatively speaking) it was to fix an issue, even an FTBFS one in packages I had never heard about.